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Anyone I’ve spent time with over the past
couple of months has heard me talk about “The Challenger Sale,”
by Matthew Dixon and Brent Adamson of the Corporate Executive
Board. I talked about their underlying research in
a post last October, and have been carrying around
my dog-eared and well-highlighted copy like it’s The Book of
Mormon. While the research and the book focus on the
broader world of sales (the empirical study included over 6,000
sellers from 60 industries), there are several insights
particularly useful as we try to clarify the world of online
advertising and marketing. Here’s one.

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Online salespeople frequently point to the lack of product
innovation as the reason they’re not making more sales.
If only our product had feature X or function Y…then they’d
buy from us. This can often begin a damaging cycle of rushed
product improvement or feature activation which achieves only
parity with some competitor’s point solution. By the time
you “innovate,” either the competitor has also innovated (and
pulled away) or the buyer simply moves the goal posts and tells
you there’s something else wrong or deficient about your
offering.

Dixon and Adamson studied this issue. They wanted to find
out what drove real customer buying loyalty in B2B environments
like ours. “Product and Service Delivery” — which includes
the feature sets of your products — accounted for just 19% of
customer loyalty. (And to those of you who think it must
then be all about price, think again. “Value-t0-price
ratio” drove just 9% of customer loyalty.) The reason why
our “New and Improved” products don’t engender loyalty?
Customers just aren’t focused on the details in the first
place. “Over and over we found that customers, generally
speaking, see significantly less difference between us and the
competition than we do ourselves,” they write. “So while we
spend much of our time emphasizing subtle differences, customers
tend to focus first on the general similarities.”

So trying to win long term loyalty through product innovation
turns out to be fool’s errand. Turns out that our customers
are often just playing along with our own obsession with feature
comparison. So then how does one create a sustainable
loyalty advantage? Through sales process
innovation. 53% of customer loyalty can be traced back
to “Sales Experience.” Specifically, suppliers who
consistently made some combination of seven moves pushed loyalty
numbers through the roof (italics are mine):

Offer unique, valuable perspectives on the
market

Help the customer navigate
alternatives

Provide ongoing advice or
consultation

Help the customer avoid potential land
mines

Educate the customer on new issues and
outcomes

Is easy to buy from

Has widespread support across the
customer organization

Dixon and Adamson put it very succinctly: “Loyalty is won out in
the field.” Customers are telling us that how you
sell is quite often more important than what you
sell. The natural inclination in almost every field
of endeavor is for sellers to immediately say “Well, that can’t
be true for our business!” I beg you to
reconsider: it’s absolutely true for our business,
and those who fail to reinvent their sales process accordingly
will find themselves forever nibbling on the edges of
commoditization.